Scenes from the Life of a Faun — Arno Schmidt

Full Title: Scenes from the Life of a Faun: A Short Novel
Arno Schmidt
Translated by John E. Woods
Marion Boyars · London & New York · 1983
First English-Language Edition · First Printing

The Book:
The first English-language edition, first printing of Arno Schmidt’s Scenes from the Life of a Faun, translated by John E. Woods and published simultaneously in London and New York by Marion Boyars in 1983. Originally published in Germany in 1953 as Aus dem Leben eines Fauns, this edition brought the novel into English for the first time thirty years after its original publication. 159 pp. Original black publisher’s cloth with silver spine lettering, retaining the original unclipped dust jacket priced $13.95.

Condition:
Near Fine in a Near Fine dust jacket. The book remains clean and square, with bright black cloth, sharp silver spine lettering, and a clean interior free of ownership markings. The original unclipped dust jacket retains strong color and presents exceptionally well, showing only trivial handling wear. No restoration is observed.

Story Of The Book

Arno Schmidt was interested in what dictatorship does after it stops being extraordinary and becomes part of an ordinary day.

Written in postwar Germany and first published in 1953, Scenes from the Life of a Faun looks back at German civilian life under National Socialism through the experiences of a provincial civil servant during the Second World War.

Schmidt turns away from generals, famous battles, and the spectacle of dictatorship. Instead, he examines routine: work, marriage, desire, memory, private resentment, and the compromises required to continue living within an authoritarian society. His protagonist outwardly participates in the world around him while cultivating an increasingly separate inner life.

The political power of the novel lies in that distance between outward conformity and private consciousness.

Rather than treating dictatorship only as something governments do to people, Schmidt examines how people adapt themselves to dictatorship—what they accept, what they conceal, and where they attempt to preserve some territory of individual freedom.

Published by Marion Boyars in 1983, this edition brought that unsettling perspective to English-language readers thirty years after the novel first appeared in Germany.

Why It’s In The Collection

Scenes from the Life of a Faun belongs in Consigned to Darkness because authoritarianism is not experienced only through arrests, censorship orders, prisons, and political violence. It also changes the boundaries of ordinary life.

Schmidt’s novel asks what happens when political power becomes part of the environment people wake up inside every morning. A person may continue working, loving, reading, remembering, and imagining—but each of those activities now takes place within limits established by a regime capable of punishing dissent.

That makes the book an important literary counterpart to the collection’s firsthand accounts of totalitarianism. Those works preserve what authoritarian systems did. Schmidt explores what living inside such a system can do to the private self.

This 1983 first English-language edition is especially collection-relevant because it preserves the moment Schmidt’s novel crossed a linguistic boundary and became available to English-language readers for the first time—thirty years after its original German publication.

Dictatorship changes history. Schmidt was interested in the quieter tragedy of how it changes an ordinary day.

Collection Categories: Literature · Anti-Authoritarianism · Anti-Totalitarianism · Political Fiction · Publication-Event Object

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Authentication Evidence

• Title page identifies Scenes from the Life of a Faun by Arno Schmidt, translated by John E. Woods, and bears the Marion Boyars publisher imprint.

• Copyright page states “First published in 1983 in Great Britain and the United States by Marion Boyars Ltd. … and Marion Boyars Inc.”

• The 1983 Marion Boyars publication represents the First English-Language Edition, published simultaneously in Great Britain and the United States.

• Copyright page identifies the original German title as Aus dem Leben eines Fauns and records translation rights from S. Fischer Verlag.

• Independent bibliographic records establish that Aus dem Leben eines Fauns was originally published in German in 1953, confirming that the 1983 Marion Boyars publication represents the work’s first appearance in English.

• No later-printing statement, subsequent-impression designation, or revised-edition statement is present, supporting identification as the First Printing.

• Standard Schmidt bibliography identifies the edition as Müther, Bibliographie Arno Schmidt, FAU 3 (31.12.1983).

• Müther FAU 3 records the Marion Boyars London/New York edition at 159 pages, issued in cloth with dust jacket.

• Hardcover ISBN 0-7145-2762-9 and Library of Congress Catalog Number 82-12901 correspond to independent bibliographic records of the 1983 Marion Boyars edition.

• Original black publisher’s cloth with silver spine lettering is present.

• Original unclipped dust jacket is present and retains the printed $13.95 publisher’s price.

• Bibliographic documentation identifies the dust-jacket design as the work of Werner Rebhuhn, after a painting by Otto Mueller.

• No book-club indicators, rebinding, facsimile components, or restoration are observed.

• Taken together, the explicit first-publication statement, simultaneous British and American publication, Müther FAU 3 bibliographic identification, original publisher’s binding, absence of a later-printing designation, and original priced dust jacket support identification as an authentic 1983 Marion Boyars First English-Language Edition · First Printing.